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Comment by cpburns2009 | Hacker News Reader

cpburns2009

Snap needs to fix their non-standard directory placement. They ignore the FHS [1] by creating /snap at the root level. And they ignore XDG [2] by persistently creating ~/snap in your home directory. I've heard Flatpak is better in this regard.

I'm sure it could help with application delivery so long as it's constrained to that. I don't want half of my standard libraries or utilities suddenly becoming sandboxed. For full blown applications sandboxing would be welcomed.

[1]: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html

[2]: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-...

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Flatpak uses /app so I’m not sure how it’s really “better”

Problem is they both need to create an area with a full separate file system which doesn’t really fit in with the FHS.

An /app isn't any better. If they insist on having a fully realized file-system, they can put it under /opt. Or, they could use symlinks to construct it under /run/{app,snap} similar to a chroot setup.

/app is not visible on the host system, only inside the container. It is chroot on steroids.

I don't mind that behavior.

/app is never visible on the host though

For flatpak, the installed apps go to /var/lib/flatpak for system-wide, ~/.local/share/flatpak for user-specific.

Then there's the question of app-created data, that would normally go into some dot-directory. Flatpak by default redirects all XDG dirs into ~/.var/app/${appid}, but as a part of the required permissions, the apps can request access to the user homedir or specific subfolders.

Some apps abuse it. Yes, I do mind, when an app liters into ~/Documents/. I'm looking at you, Viber.

They just create ~/.var if you install program for single user, if as root it goes somewhere to /usr/share

Does it matters?

Do standards matter?

Yes.

depends if they are holding back a better future, then no

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